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1.MaryTrevelyan, Maryreports from liberated Belgium;a6 Trevelyan to TSE, 8 Oct. 1944: ‘The food situation is said to be very difficult & when I go to call on a Princess I am to take her a packet of tea. In Normandy we lived a primitive life, to say the least of it. The worst trials were the cold, damp, mud – impossibility of washing & lack of light.’ Trevelyan to TSE, 18 Oct. 1944: ‘Oh yes, it’s not all giving tea to Princesses. It is mostly, at present, trying to cope with literally thousands of exhausted, dirty, hungry men, here for 48 hours leave.’

10 Dec. 1944: ‘I am much more depressed today having had a victim of the terrible Breendonck concentration camp [north of Brussels] to tea, with his wife and boy of three months. He I think is dying, and they are all starving and cold. There is so little one can do and that is only one little family among millions.’

16 Dec. 1944: ‘The general starvation seems as bad as ever, for the poor impossible, for the people who have a little money, almost impossible. Yesterday I had a friend to tea, a German Jew, and his wife and tiny baby. I gave them as good a tea as possible, but they ate with the greatest caution because they thought it might make them ill as they were not used to so much food. The man told me that he never eats until mid-day, none of them have even a hot drink until then because there is no gas. The room in which this couple live has water trickling down the walls, the baby, two months old, is growing out of the only clothes it has. The Mother wore a very thin coat and a taffeta dress, the only clothes she had, and it was snowing outside. The man was a victim of Breendonck, the terrible concentration camp near here. He is dying of TB and general ill treatment. This is only one little family out of millions. You’ll remember how I told you that I took tea to a Princesse when I was first here. She and her daughter came to tea here this week, dressed in fur coats certainly, but I have never seen two people eat so much, with comments about the food all the time. The Prince Albert de Ligne, her husband, sent me a message that he was disappointed that I hadn’t invited him too, so I must do that this week. He is a very distinguished old boy, Belgian Ambassador in most capital cities.’

2.MichaelOakley, Michael Oakley (1922–2002) attended Belmont Abbey School (a Benedictine public school) – where he happened to star as Becket in a school production of Murder in the Cathedral, being coached by Robert Speaight; he was also a prefect, and Head of School – and upon leaving school he joined the monastery as Brother James: he remained an oblate member of the community for the entirety of his career. At Belmont Abbey School he taught for many years English, Latin, Greek, French and Art. He went on to translate Horace’s Odes, and Virgil’s Aeneid (the Everyman Edition), and he fulfilled the wish of Monsignor Ronald Knox that after his death Oakley should complete his unfinished translation of The Imitation of Christ. A gifted poet and light versifier, he greatly enjoyed writing epigrams and acrostics. From 1969 he taught at the Belmont Prep School at Aldervasley Hall, Derbyshire.

TSEOakley, MichaelTSE on his juvenalia;a2n to Aidan Williams, Abbot of Belmont Abbey, Hereford, 15 Feb. 1945: ‘Squadron/Leader [John W.] Thompson has shown me a number of poems by a novice named Michael Oakley, and has asked me to report to you in confidence my opinion of their value. I gather that the question of this young man’s vocation is a difficult one to decide, and this makes me apprehensive of saying too much or too little, or anything that might be misleading.

‘These poems seem to have been written between his sixteenth and twentieth year. The period of adolescence to which they belong makes it all the more difficult to predict his future as a poet with any confidence. The poems at the age of sixteen are certainly much above the average for that age. Undoubtedly they may be said to be as good as much verse written at that age by some men who have later become famous poets. On the other hand, the most that one can say confidently about poetry written between the ages of sixteen and eighteen is that the author is obviously a person of talent who ought to develop considerable powers in some higher activity, but whether that activity will prove, when the powers mature, to be poetry is impossible to say. I think it is much, on the whole, in the young man’s favour that he seems to have been so little influenced by the poetic fashions of the present time, which are usually very evident in his contemporaries. ThereHopkins, Gerard Manleyhis influence;a6 is, perhaps, aThompson, Francis;a1n trace of Francis Thompson and not the strong influence of Gerard Hopkins which I should expect. The influences seem, on the whole, to be more Victorian. His fluency is certainly remarkable, and he has a good command of the kind of verse he writes. I say “a good command” because I think at least that one has reason to expect that he will eventually write good prose.

‘What I fail to detect is the emergence in the later poems of anything quite original and unexpected. One would hope to find odd phrases or lines here and there in which, almost unconsciously, the lad of twenty is saying something new or something in a way in which it has not been said before and which bears the stamp of the developing personality. I confess that I at least have not found these. It is possible that this is a young man whose originality may appear rather late, but I do not find such evidence in these poems as would seem to justify, at this stage, his shaping his future life to conform with his activity as a poet.’

3.ArturoBarea, ArturoThe Clash;a1 Barea, The Clash (1945). TSE to Hayward, 13 Mar. 1945: ‘Barea’s new volume is great stuff …’ TSE to Barea, 20 Mar.: ‘I have read this book with the most intense interest. It is not only fully up to the high standard of its predecessors, but completes the trilogy magnificently. One would have supposed that one’s sensibility to such a drama as the siege of Madrid would have been blunted by the events of the last few years, but, on the contrary, your presentation is such that I only felt the tragedy and importance of the story you told to be magnified by our knowledge of subsequent European events.’

4.MichaelMacowan, Michael Macowan (1906–80), actor and director; later famous for Dickens of London (1976). He served during the war in the Army Educational Corps, with the rank of captain.

5.EricNewton, Eric Newton (1893–1965), artist, writer, art critic (Manchester Guardian and The Times) and broadcaster. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University, 1959.

Stella Mary Newton, née Pearce (1901–2001), fashion designer and dress historian, designed the costumes and sets for both The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral. See her article, ‘The First Three Plays by T. S. Eliot: Designs for Settings and Costumes’, Costume 24 (1990), 97–110.

6.DavidLow, David Low (1891–1963), Australian cartoonist, worked for many years in the UK, initially (from 1927) for the Evening Standard; later for the Manchester Guardian. Knighted in 1962.

See TSE to David Low, 30 Nov. 1945: ‘Thank you very much for sending me a copy of The Saturday Book in which I have the honour of being one of your specimens. What is one to say about a caricature of oneself? It is so extremely difficult for the victim to judge: but I am surprised to note a certain resemblance to General de Gaulle which I had never noticed before. But if the one of myself is as good as the others, it is very good indeed. I thought the drawing of Julian Huxley particularly masterly’ (Beinecke).